NFV: state of the art, challenges, and implementation in next generation mobile networks (vEPC)

By Hassan Hawilo, Abdallah Shami, M. Mirahmadi, Rasool Asal. IEEE Network, 2014

469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As mobile network users look forward to the connectivity speeds of 5G networks, service providers are facing challenges in complying with connectivity demands without substantial financial investments. Network function virtualization (NFV) is introduced as a new methodology that offers a way out of this bottleneck. NFV is poised to change the core structure of telecommunications infrastructure to be more cost-efficient. In this article, we introduce an NFV framework, and discuss the challenges and requirements of its use in mobile networks. In particular, an NFV framework in the virtual environment is proposed. Moreover, in order to reduce signaling traffic and achieve better performance, this article proposes a criterion to bundle multiple functions of a virtualized evolved packet core in a single physical device or a group of adjacent devices. The analysis shows that the proposed grouping can reduce the network control traffic by 70 percent.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1bcb4daf70f65e92b4003e5a5d446681d5380e4

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In Computer Networks and Communications

Citations in the corpus

Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network: A Survey (2018, background): “5G networks, including inconsistent interfaces, frequent handovers, extensive backhauling [163], and complicated heterogeneity, by specifying and providing intelligent and flexible management and orchestration systems [164].”
A survey on service function chaining (2016, background): “Now, services may be deployed as a software in a virtualized form, called as virtual network functions (VNFs) and these functions may be moved across the network, without changes in the actual physical topology [13, 40, 96].”
Security for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “A detailed article on the benefits and challenges in using NFV in mobile networks [174] discusses how the foreseen signaling costs can be reduced in mobile networks.”
Survey on Network Virtualization Hypervisors for Software Defined Networking (2015, background): “We also give an overview of existing survey articles in these topic areas.”
A Survey on Low Latency Towards 5G: RAN, Core Network and Caching Solutions (2017, methodology): “N-based architecture The architecture of 5G is proposed based on SDN with 5G vision to meet large throughput, massive connectivity and low latency. Core Network Architecture [157], [159]–[161], [166]–[172] NFV-based architecture NFV invalidates the dependency on hardware platform and makes easy depl”
The role of big data in smart city (2016, background): “The NFV technology takes advantage of cloud-based infrastructure and networking services to form the NFV infrastructure (Hawilo et al., 2014).”
Software Defined Optical Networks (SDONs): A Comprehensive Survey (2015, background): “Recent studies [468], [469] discuss the potential of SDN, NFV, and optical technologies to achieve the growing demands of broadcasters and media.”
Resource Allocation in NFV: A Comprehensive Survey (2016, background): “TSPs will need to efficiently compose such chains to deploy customized and dynamic NFV-enabled network services [54], [55].”
A Survey of Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Software Defined Networking (SDN): Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “Integrated with SDN, the software defined NFV architecture is able to jointly optimize network functions and resources [62], [231].”
Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges (2015, background): “virtualized evolved packet core is presented in [11], while the reliability challenges of NFV infrastructures are examined in [12].”
A Survey on Mobile Edge Networks: Convergence of Computing, Caching and Communications (2017, methodology): “Network function virtualization is a recently proposed network architecture that utilizes IT virtualization technologies to virtualize network node functions on top of standard general purpose hardware, which changes the communication network infrastructure to be more cost-efficient [31].”
Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey (2015, methodology): “ments to support packet processing at line-rate for multiple tenants [29], [79].”
Resource Slicing in Virtual Wireless Networks: A Survey (2016, background): “Another example is the work in [24] where the authors apply NFV to the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) of a LTE network.”
Fog-computing-based radio access networks: issues and challenges (2015, background): “y hardware. Recently, academic researchers and network engineers are exploiting virtual environments to simplify and enhance NFV in order to ﬁnd its way smoothly into the telecommunicati ons industry [16]. Based on the SDN for F-RANs, the programmable connectivity between virtual network functions (”
Digital Twin in the IoT Context: A Survey on Technical Features, Scenarios, and Architectural Models (2020, background): “The layering and the separation of the functionalities of this architecture is designed to better serve programmers and developers in order to add elasticity, higher levels of flexibility, and quality of service in the future communication networks [110]–[112].”
An Approach for Service Function Chain Routing and Virtual Function Network Instance Migration in Network Function Virtualization Architectures (2017, methodology): “To support the NFV technology both ETSI [6], [7] and IETF [8] have been deﬁning novel network architectures able to allocate resource for Virtualized Network Function (VNF) as well as to manage and orchestrate NFV to support services.”